One Man’s Wallpaper

Authenticating Jackson Pollocks

The art world, we keep hearing, is in a fine mess, awash in money and bereft of direction, and a recent documentary, “Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?,” seems to prove the point. In it, a retired truck driver in California named Teri Horton buys what she considers to be an ugly painting as a gag gift for five dollars at a thrift store, is later told that it looks like a Jackson Pollock (the title refers to her initial reaction), and then struggles to convince anyone who matters that it could be the real thing. The film pits old-fashioned art authenticators (Thomas Hoving, the former Met director, runs his fingers over the painting before declaring, “It’s dead on arrival”) against a forensic scientist in Montreal, Peter Paul Biro, who finds what he believes to be Pollock’s paint-stained fingerprints on the back of the canvas. Horton says she has turned down an offer of nine million dollars for the painting from a Saudi collector.

The other day, at Cipriani Dolci, in New York, Kevin Jamison, a graduate student in government and politics at St. John’s, and the co-founder of a fledgling art consultancy, flipped through a copy of Ellen Landau’s “Jackson Pollock,” comparing the reprints in the book with a pair of images stored on his iPhone. These were of paintings he’d bought, for twenty-five dollars apiece, at an antique shop in Norfolk, Virginia, this summer, and they looked, to an untrained eye, like plausible Pollocks, at least in the sense that they were abstract and drippy. “They were under a stack of paintings about this tall,” Jamison, who has a baby face masked by stubble, said, pointing at the tabletop. One is seventeen inches by twenty-one inches, and painted on rice paper, using only white and gray. The other is twenty-six by twenty-six, on canvas, and much more colorful: green, yellow, red, white, and black.

Jamison watched “Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?” upon returning from Virginia, and then set about finding what he hoped could be useful forensic details, which he also showed on his iPhone: a flake of gold paint, visible only under magnification (Pollock used gold spray paint in his studio); rusty vintage staples; and a peculiar screwlike indentation that he found on the left side of the larger painting, which he believes could match a similar mark that he spotted in Pollock’s “One: Number 31, 1950,” at MOMA. (A caveat: referring to the painting’s left side “depends on what someone considers the top or the bottom,” Jamison said. “I’ve been looking at it for a couple of months and hanging it different ways.”)

“As of now, what they’re worth is what I paid for them,” Jamison said. But Peter Paul Biro, the forensic expert, has agreed to examine the paintings in person early next month, and Jamison has also corresponded with Richard Taylor, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon, who examined fractal patterns in some of the contested Herbert Matter Pollocks (two dozen paintings discovered in a Long Island locker) currently on exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art.

Before forensics, the standard process of authentication involved establishing provenance. The provenance of Jamison’s putative Pollocks is as follows: Lana Wolcott, the proprietor of the Antique Design Center, in Norfolk, bought them at a sheriff’s auction, a few years ago, as part of the foreclosed-on belongings of Joseph Michaud, a “wild and unfettered art dealer” from the area, she said, who has since died. “He was the kind of guy that would think he saw a Picasso in a paper bag,” she said. One such would-be Picasso hangs in her den: “It’s a wonderful painting of women who are sitting with their breasts exposed and platters of fish in front of them.”

Michaud, according to an associate of Wolcott’s named John Mortensen, had decorated an entire room and hallway of his house with Pollock-style works, “almost like wallpapering.” There were twenty or thirty of them in all. “I don’t know where Joe found these, but he never had a lot of money, so he didn’t pay very much for ’em,” Mortensen said.

Wolcott, in any event, saw the paintings as “very contemporary, very fun, but nothing that I’d ever hang in my own house,” and dumped them in the back of her store, which is better known for its nineteenth-century chandeliers than for Abstract Expressionism. Jamison had been visiting her shop semi-regularly for years before seizing on the possible Pollocks. “He sees delusions of grandeur at every corner,” Wolcott said. “And that’s a very good, useful thing to have. He’s not jaded yet.” ♦